Robert Littell

"In March 1953, four women meet in Room 408 of Moscow's deluxe Metropole Hotel. They have gathered, not altogether willingly, to reminisce about Vladimir Mayakovsky, the poet who in death had become a national idol of Soviet Russia. In life, however, he was a much more complicated figure. Each of these ladies loved Mayakovsky in the course of his life, and as they piece together their memories of him, a portrait of the artist emerges. From his early years as a leader of the Futurist movement to years as a propagandist for the Revolution, to the censorship battles that turned him against the State, Mayakovsky is revealed as a passionate, complex man who lived at the center of history and fought to hold onto his ideals even in the face of a world changing for the worse. The Mayakovsky Tapes is an ambitious, impressive novel that captures the tumultuous life of one of the most significant writers of the Soviet era"--

A Novel

The Mayakovsky Tapes

A tale inspired by the life of forefront twentieth-century Russian poet Osip Mandelstam recounts his outspoken criticism of the Stalin regime, the verbal distribution of his famous "Stalin Epigram" that led to his arrest, and his subsequent exile and death in a Siberian transit camp.

The Stalin Epigram

Martin Odum, disgraced CIA field agent turned private detective in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, is struggling his way through a labyrinth of memories of past identities - 'legends' in CIA parlance. Is he really Martin Odum? Is he Dante Pippen, IRA explosives maven turned CIA agent? Or is he another legend? These men speak different languages, like different foods and women, and have different skills, and Odum's not sure if he's suffering from multiple personality disorder, brainwashing or just plain exhaustion. When Odum is employed to solve a case for a young Russian, Stella Kastner, he is drawn back into the world he left not remembering quite why, struggling to untangle his true identity while under the strains of mortal danger and psychological disorientation. An extraordinarily intelligent thriller, taut and explosive, Legends is an unrelentingly arresting page-turner.

Legends (New Ed)

Young Philby

Working as a private investigator in New Mexico, former CIA agent Lemuel Gunn comes to the aid of Ornella Neppi, who, making a mess out of her uncle's bail bonds business, needs his help in bringing in an elusive criminal who jumped bail. 30,000 first printing.

A Nasty Piece of Work

Edward Klein

Richard Z. Chesnoff

If Israel Lost the War

An epic saga of the Soviet Union's brutal first decades-from The New York Times bestselling master of espionage. Hailed as "the American le Carré," Robert Littell presents an ambitious novel about star-crossed idealist Alexander Til. When Til returns from America to Petrograd on the eve of the October Revolution in 1917, it is to put his life on the line in the hope of transforming Russia. But after witnessing the birth of a new era, he watches the people, and his own ideals, trampled by the rise of Josef Stalin-with whom Til is destined to have a shattering confrontation. Taking readers from the storming of the Winter Palace to the nightmares of the gulag, The Revolutionist is a masterwork of historical fiction.

The Revolutionist

A republication of a long-unavailable earlier work follows the personal vendetta of cryptographer Charlie Heller against those responsible for murdering his fiancée, an endeavor that pits him against the CIA and takes him behind the Iron Curtain. Reprint.

The Amateur

Dans l'Europe des années trente débute la plus intrigante carrière de l'histoire de l'espionnage : celle de Philby. Ce jeune Anglais, recruté par les services de renseignements russes, part couvrir la guerre d'Espagne en tant que journaliste pour le Times. Mais de quel côté est-il vraiment ? Est-il passé dans le camp du KGB ? Est-il en réalité toujours resté fidèle à la CIA ? A moins qu'il n'ait rejoint le camp de Franco, comme tout porte à le croire ?

portrait de l'espion en jeune homme

Philby

Robespierre Pravdin, a hustler from the future with a victim's instincts is set loose on the streets of an unsuspecting Moscow and ends up in a boarding house whose other residents add to his vision and dreams of Mother Russia

Mother Russia

A Kirkus Best Fiction Book of 2012 A Kansas City Star Top Book the Year When Kim Philby fled to Moscow in 1963, he became the most notorious double agent in the history of espionage. Recruited into His Majesty's Secret Intelligence Service at the beginning of World War II, he rose rapidly in the ranks to become the chief liaison officer with the CIA in Washington after the war. The exposure of other members of the group of British double agents known as the Cambridge Five led to the revelation that Philby had begun spying for the Soviet Union years before he joined the British intelligence service. He eventually fled to Moscow one jump ahead of British agents who had come to arrest him, and spent the last twenty-five years of his life in Russia. In Young Philby, Robert Littell recounts the little-known story of the spy's early years. Through the words of Philby's friends and lovers, as well as his Soviet and English handlers, we follow the evolution of a mysteriously beguiling man who kept his masters on both sides of the Iron Curtain guessing about his ultimate loyalties. As each layer of ambiguity is exposed, questions surface: What made this infamous double (or should that be triple?) agent tick? And, in the end, who was the real Kim Philby?

A tight, captivating story of a naive child’s encounters with a Soviet dictator, the 20th novel by Robert Littell After the sudden death of his nuclear physicist father and the arrest of his mother during the Stalinist purge of Jewish doctors, young Leon Rozental—intellectually precocious and possessing a disarming candor—is hiding from the NKVD in the secret rooms of the House on the Embankment, a large building in Moscow where many Soviet officials and apparatchiks live and work. One day after following a passageway, Leon meets Koba, an old man whose apartment is protected by several guards. Koba is a high-ranking Soviet officer with troubling insight into the thoughts and machinations of Comrade Stalin. Through encounters between a naive boy and a paranoid tyrant, Robert Littell creates in Comrade Koba a nuanced portrayal of the Soviet dictator, showing his human side and his simultaneous total disregard for and ignorance of the suffering he inï¬‚icted on the Russian people. The charm and spontaneity of young Leon make him an irresistible character—and not unlike Holden Caulï¬?eld, whom he admits to identifying with—caught in the spider’s web of the story woven by this enigmatic old man.

Comrade Koba

A scientist looking to defect causes Cold War chaos in this darkly humorous spy novel by the bestselling author of The Company. A.J. LeWinter is an American scientist, for years an insignificant cog in America’s complex defense machinery. While at an academic conference in Tokyo, LeWinter contacts the KGB station chief and says he wants to defect. He tantalizes the Russians with U.S. military secrets he claims to possess, but is his defection genuine? Neither the Russians nor the Americans are sure, and LeWinter is swept up in a terrifying political chess match of deceit and treachery. Deft and dazzlingly plotted, this is the book that introduced Robert Littell—the opening shot of a brilliant career. “Concise, smart and funny, this novel turns Cold War spy clichés on their head...This book still packs a punch and seems prescient to boot. Those who only know Littell’s more recent works should enjoy this fast, fun trip into the past.” —Publishers Weekly “Although the Cold War has passed, Littell’s novel remains instructive for a world where large agencies run rampant over individual liberties in the name of patriotism and homeland security.” —Foreword Reviews

A Novel of Duplicity

The Defection of A. J. Lewinter

In a republication of the author's 1973 first novel, unremarkable American scientist A. J. Lewinter triggers a series of high-stakes events when, during an academic conference in Tokyo, he contacts the KGB with an offer to defect, a proposal neither country can be sure is genuine. By the author of The Company. 10,000 first printing.

Like the Arkady Renko novels of Martin Cruz Smith, Robert Littell’s masterful Mother Russia transports readers back in time and behind the Iron Curtain to experience the extremes of Soviet society. Robespierre Pravdin is a black marketeer who prowls Moscow’s streets and alleys hustling wristwatches. Wishing only to survive in a city suffocated by paranoia and schizophrenia, Robespierre manages to make a tidy profit and stay under the state’s radar—until, one day, he meets the woman called “Mother Russia†? and becomes ensnared in the Byzantine and profoundly dangerous game of politics. This is another darkly engrossing page-turner from the bestselling author of The Sisters and The Defection of A. J. Lewinter.

In what Christopher Lehmann-Haupt of The New York Times called "the plot of plots," Robert Littell has created the CIA "legends" Francis and Carroll, dubbed "The Sisters Death and Night" by their cohorts. But few know what these enigmatic and extremely dangerous operatives do. They plot-and they're plotting the perfect crime. They've located the perfect pawn-the Potter, the exiled ex-head of the KGB sleeper school-and, with artful deception, the Sisters coerce him into betraying his last and best sleeper, the man he considers his son. Once awakened, this sleeper, an assassin living secretly in the U.S., will launch a mission of death-unless the Potter, in a desperate race against time, can stop his protege from committing the Sisters' perfect and world-shattering crime.

The Sisters

In March 1953, four women meet in Room 408 of Moscow’s deluxe Hotel Metropol. They have gathered to reminisce about Vladimir Mayakovsky, the poet who in death had become a national idol of Soviet Russia. In life, however, he was a much more complicated figure. The ladies, each of whom could claim to have been a muse to the poet, loved or loathed Mayakovsky in the course of his life, and as they piece together their conflicting memories of him, a portrait of the artist as a young idealist emerges. From his early years as a leader of the Futurist movement to his work as a propagandist for the Revolution and on to the censorship battles that turned him against the state (and, more ominously, the state against him), their recollections reveal Mayakovsky as a passionate, complex, sexually obsessed creature trapped in the epicenter of history, struggling to hold onto his ideals in the face of a revolution betrayed. Written by Robert Littell, whom The Washington Post called “one of the most talented, most original voices in American fiction today, period,” The Mayakovsky Tapes is an ambitious, impressive novel that brings to life the tumultuous Stalinist era and the predicament of the artists ensnared in it.

The New York Times bestselling spy novel The Company lays bare the history and inner workings of the CIA. This critically acclaimed blockbuster from internationally renowned novelist Robert Littell seamlessly weaves together history and fiction to create a multigenerational, wickedly nostalgic saga of the CIA—known as “the Company” to insiders. Racing across a landscape spanning the legendary Berlin Base of the ’50s, the Soviet invasion of Hungary, the Bay of Pigs, Afghanistan, and the Gorbachev putsch, The Company tells the thrilling story of agents imprisoned in double lives, fighting an amoral, elusive, formidable enemy—and each other—in an internecine battle within the Company itself. A brilliant, stunningly conceived epic thriller, adapted as a TNT miniseries starring Chris O’Donnell, Alfred Molina, and Michael Keaton, The Company confirms Littell’s place among the genre’s elite.

A Novel of the CIA

The Company

“A searing, thrilling, intelligent and often blackly funny book . . . [by] the finest American writer of espionage fiction” (John Connolly, #1 internationally-bestselling author of Woman in the Woods). Under the leadership of a visionary woman president of the United States, the global community brokers a major compromise between Israel and the Palestinian authority in the hopes of snuffing out the violent flash-point that fuels the flames of global terrorism. But then, Isaac Apfulbaum, a well-known fundamentalist rabbi, is taken hostage by Dr. al-Saath, a legendary Palestinian terrorist, who demands the release of several Palestinian prisoners in exchange for his captive. As Israel coaxes Elihu—a former Mossad officer—out of retirement to hunt down the terrorist who motivated his final mission, al-Saath and Apfulbaum find themselves building an extraordinary relationship between hostage taker and hostage: parallels between these two battle-hardened partisans become the bonds that could lead to reconciliation. But the Mossad strike team is closing in . . . Ferociously suspenseful and brilliantly topical, Vicious Circle is a thriller that, like The Company before it, breaks down an entire culture of violence into the corrupted consciences that embody it. “Muscularly plotted suspense.” —The Washington Post “A tale to hold its own with . . . John le Carré’s The Little Drummer Girl . . . and Robert Stone’s Damascus Gate.” —Booklist (starred review) “[A] suspenseful and serious thriller.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

A Novel of Complicity

Vicious Circle

In a near-future world in which a visionary woman U.S. president brokers a major compromise between Israel and Palestine, decorated Mossad officer Elihu, who retired after the retaliatory assassination of a Hamas leader, works to hunt down a legendary terrorist who has taken a high-profile fundamentalist rabbi hostage. Reprint. 20,000 first printing.

Robert Littell

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